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A review by nevinator
An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America by Joseph Bottum
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.75
Everyone is in the shadow of Tocqueville‘s “Democracy in America.” This Frenchman has summed up all American Religious Sociology, in 1835, as the tension between: Protestant Theology/religion, capitalism, and democracy. Suddenly the role and prominence of Protestantism disappeared from American life. This book explores how and why that happens.
It’s centrally claim is that this problem was specifically caused by Protestantism itself. America survived Marxism, materialism, secularization, but it couldn’t survive the collapse of the Protestant mainline churches. This created a gap to be filled by the children of those Protestants, the post-Protestants, he calls them. A whole generation that became spiritual but not religious. He doesn’t focus on how evangelicals tried to rebuild from this collapse, but the shift towards a more politically centric faith makes sense from Bottom’s thesis, as a rich tradition of Protestantism just disappeared.
What Bottom’s more interested in what tried to be built by the non-Protestant Americans as the replacement: the post-Protestants and Catholicism. In short, a rise among post-Protestants to move past Christianity, as a sign of moral superiority with thoughts like “it’s more Christian to not be Christian”, and the divorcing of Catholic thought-system from the practices and reputation of the Roman Catholic Church created in both American Christians and non-Christians an emphasis to be more “moral”, “right”, and “intellectual” than their peers. This made spiritual living the new norm and pillar in American life. Moralism replaced Protestantism; and thus Tocqueville’s complement on how the stream of Protestantism was accessible by all in American life vanished.
What I love about this book is not only the presentation of this thesis but also how it is a concise summary of all American Religious sociology in supporting that thesis. I whole heartedly recommend this book for everyone to understand the religious environment of America more broadly.
It’s centrally claim is that this problem was specifically caused by Protestantism itself. America survived Marxism, materialism, secularization, but it couldn’t survive the collapse of the Protestant mainline churches. This created a gap to be filled by the children of those Protestants, the post-Protestants, he calls them. A whole generation that became spiritual but not religious. He doesn’t focus on how evangelicals tried to rebuild from this collapse, but the shift towards a more politically centric faith makes sense from Bottom’s thesis, as a rich tradition of Protestantism just disappeared.
What Bottom’s more interested in what tried to be built by the non-Protestant Americans as the replacement: the post-Protestants and Catholicism. In short, a rise among post-Protestants to move past Christianity, as a sign of moral superiority with thoughts like “it’s more Christian to not be Christian”, and the divorcing of Catholic thought-system from the practices and reputation of the Roman Catholic Church created in both American Christians and non-Christians an emphasis to be more “moral”, “right”, and “intellectual” than their peers. This made spiritual living the new norm and pillar in American life. Moralism replaced Protestantism; and thus Tocqueville’s complement on how the stream of Protestantism was accessible by all in American life vanished.
What I love about this book is not only the presentation of this thesis but also how it is a concise summary of all American Religious sociology in supporting that thesis. I whole heartedly recommend this book for everyone to understand the religious environment of America more broadly.